For most brands selling online, a website is an important platform through which many business goals can be achieved: conveying your brand's value proposition, engaging with customers, and perhaps most crucially, getting people to buy your product.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is therefore a tactic that cannot be overlooked. It's a mix of strategies that aim to increase the chances of visitors taking a specific action (or "conversion") when they come across your website, ranging from signing up for newsletters to committing to a purchase.
You can read our beginner's guide to Conversion Rate Optimisation here, and we've put together five different ways CRO can help your business supercharge both its sales figures and customer engagement.
1. Create effective landing pages that compliment your marketing
It's obviously important to garner interest for your brand through building a strong marketing campaign, but if you then push them towards a web page that doesn’t talk directly to that piece of promotion, you risk them losing interest and you losing the sale.
Make sure you build landing pages that deliver what you have promised in the ad, which was what prompted the reader to click it in the first place.
A landing page is a web page that has one sole purpose: to turn a visitor into a customer. The copy should be hyper-focused on a certain offering, with a call-to-action that accomplishes either of two things: lead generation (a prompt for the customer to fill out an online form), or directing the visitor to a check out page (and buy a product or service).
2. Losing the navigation bar might help
Since landing pages are solely created to convert, limiting the number of links can be effective in reducing distraction. Removing the navigation bar can eliminate the temptation for visitors to jump to another page instead of reading the information of the landing page thoroughly. Yuppiechef, a retailer for kitchen tools, found a 100% increase in conversions after losing the navigation bar from its landing pages.
By using A/B testing, you can find out whether having a navigation panel does makes a difference to the conversion rate of your landing pages.
3. Increase user engagement with pop-ups
Website pop-ups do make a difference when it comes to user engagement and conversion. These reminders generally have a click-through rate of around 3%, which is much higher than most other forms of digital advertising.
According to Sumo, in order to make a pop-up truly interactive, you should make sure that it appears on a page that generates high-level interest, and the pop-up message needs to offer value that will lead to sign-up actions. For example, an exit pop-up on a product page that offers an attractive discount just as the visitor's about to leave your site.
As a general rule, pop-ups are more effective if they don't appear as soon as the page finishes loading. Start by contacting your web hosting provider to find the most suitable pop-up plugins for your site.
4. Create a heatmap for your sales pages
You can easily update and tweak your site design without having to bring in a UX designer or focus group by implementing a heatmap tool that assesses how customers use your existing site and how you can exploit that. Heatmapping shows which part of a web page draws the attention from visitors, so editing your website to display your products, sales pages or "buy now" buttons in the "warmest" areas is an easy hack to boost your conversion.
5. Make checking out clean and simple
When you make a sale online, your customers will need to enter their details into a form; make sure that your website is not overwhelming them with long forms during the checkout stage, as this can be a big turn off and drags down your conversion rate. According to a report by Sale Cycle, almost 77% of shoppers abandon their check out forms and leave their products in the cart.
The less distractions at the checkout stage, the higher the conversion rate. So, keep online forms short and sweet; breaking them down into different parts, alongside a progress tracker, would help. You should also make sure to speed test the loading time of your check out forms, both on desktop and mobile devices.
Through diligently testing and fine-tuning your website based on the resulting data, Conversion Rate Optimisation can lead you to a path of growth. And as you manage your growing business, make sure to sign up for an American Express® Business Card. You get up to 54 days to make payments, thereby giving you more time to manage your cashflow and make the most of what you've got coming in.¹
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